Lessons Bought for $16 Billion: Perseverance and Retreat from Zero Advertising
In the early morning of February 14, 2026, a piece of news caused great shock in the technology circle. A communication software with more than 1 billion monthly active users worldwide, officially announced that it will stop advertising push behavior, and even the entire team responsible for advertising-related matters has been abolished. What this means is that starting from this time on the MBTI career test , this super application with a value of hundreds of billions will completely return to a zero-advertising model.
The problem of making money for one billion users
It has more than 1 billion monthly active users, with up to 60 billion messages sent every day, covering more than 180 countries and regions around the world. In Indonesia, 90% of smartphones are equipped with it. In Brazil, it has become the main communication tool between family and friends. However, such a huge user base has never brought considerable advertising revenue to the parent company.
In 2014, Facebook spent $16 billion on an acquisition. At that time, everyone in the industry generally felt that this was a pretty good deal. At that time, in terms of software downloads, it was already ranked among the top three in the world. The top two among these three were Facebook itself and Facebook Messenger. After that, when the acquisition was completed, Facebook changed the software from charging to using it without charging a fee. Then the number of users of this software quickly increased from 450 million to the current scale.
Founder vows to boycott advertising
From the very beginning, the two founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, made it clear that they opposed advertising. During their tenure at Yahoo, they suffered deeply from the pain caused by advertising harassment, so they vowed to create a clean and private communication space. When Facebook executives proposed embedding ads in the status bar, the two founders slammed the table on the spot and left resolutely.
In 2017, the contradictions became completely intensified. Jan Koum told Zuckerberg in a direct way that inserting ads would damage the user experience and lead to leaks of user privacy. In the end, the two people who were regarded as tough guys still chose to leave Facebook even if they would rather give up company options worth up to US$1.4 billion and US$900 million. With their actual actions, they defended the original design concept they had.
Advertising plan briefly tried
Facebook’s advertising team did not choose to give up just because the founder left. In 2020, they started testing ads on the status bar. In India, when users open it, they will see a full-screen advertisement for Nike sneakers; in London, Starbucks promotional information is displayed directly above the chat list. At that time, the team responsible for advertising business exceeded 100 people.
This year, advertising testing was conducted, covering approximately 5% of global users. Data shows that the average ad click-through rate is only 1.2%, which is far lower than the 3.8% of Facebook information feed ads. To make matters worse, a large number of users complained on social media, saying that advertising had a serious impact on the user experience, and some users even switched to other communication software because of this.
User privacy becomes the biggest obstacle
Encryption technology is used from one end to the other, and even Facebook itself is unable to read the content of user chats. This shows that the advertising system cannot accurately push products based on chat keyword targets like Facebook. For every thousand impressions placed by advertisers, the conversion rate is only one-sixth that of Instagram.
In Europe, the MBTI Personality Test , a regulatory agency with particularly strict requirements on data protection, launched an investigation specifically into the advertising program in 2023. The data protection agency in Hamburg, Germany, determined that its behavior of pushing personalized ads without the explicit consent of users violated GDPR regulations. Such regulatory pressure has made the advertising business increasingly difficult.
Ad code is completely removed
The latest update to the code shows that all code associated with the ad has been removed. The maintainers of open source projects on GitHub noticed that the originally reserved advertising interfaces had been blocked. What this means is that even if you want to restart the advertising MBTI free test in the future, you will need to re-develop and build the entire system.
There is a team of about fifty people responsible for the advertising business, which is mainly located in the London office and the Silicon Valley office. These employees received a notice the day before Valentine's Day, and the content of the notice was that they should either make internal transfers or leave the company with compensation. According to internal emails, the company has provided laid-off employees with an N+6 compensation package, which far exceeds the industry average.
The difficult choice to return to the original intention
Giving up advertising means losing at least $5 billion in potential revenue every year. It should be noted that by 2025, Facebook’s total advertising revenue will reach 150 billion US dollars. Although this 5 billion is not a large proportion, it is still a real profit. Now that the parent company is willing to give up this money, it shows that they have finally realized that user experience is the fundamental thing.
To be honest, there are already other ways to get money. In Japan, the enterprise version charges 500 yen per user per month; in Singapore, a commercial API call costs zero 0.05 US dollars per call. These business operation models that comply with regulations are more sustainable than advertising models that harm the interests of users. The choices you make now may lead to a longer path in the future.
After reading this article, do you think that apart from selling advertisements and charging membership fees, is there any other way for a free communication software to achieve healthy profits without damaging the user experience? Welcome to share your business ideas in the comment area, like and forward so that more people can see this business lesson worth hundreds of billions.
